Saturday, August 4, 2012

So, Thursday was kind of a big day for film history. Citizen
Kane was “officially” unseated as The
Greatest Film of All Time.

Okay, back up. Some background: When people say things like
“By consensus, Citizen Kane is the
greatest film of all time,” the “consensus” that they’re talking about is (probably)
(maybe) the Sight & Sound poll, which has been conducted by BFI (The British
Film Institute) once every ten years since 1952, and is generally considered the best of its kind. In that first edition, the
number one film was Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), but Citizen Kane topped the 1962 poll and has done so in every poll
since. That is, until now.

The *new* Greatest Film of All Time is… Dramatic pause…
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo! After first
showing up in the 1982 poll, Vertigo steadily climbed the ranks, and finished #2 (behind Kane) in the 2002 edition. Some people even predicted it
would knock Citizen Kane off its
perch in the new poll.

Now technically, this is just the critic’s poll, and there’s
also a director’s poll, but the critic’s poll tends to be the one given more
weight (for reasons I don’t necessarily understand). To obtain the results, BFI
asked 846 leading critics, programmers, and academics from all over the world
to list what they believe to be the ten greatest films. And what does BFI mean
by “Greatest?” Well, here’s what they actually said in the email sent to
voters:

As
for what we mean by 'Greatest', we leave that open to your interpretation. You
might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the
ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten
films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.

This is by far the largest voting body the poll has ever
seen, as the 2002 poll only had 145 voters. So, it does make sense that with a
voting body more than quintupling in size, the results were bound to be a bit
different. But like most voting-based outcomes, there are inherent flaws in
the process that must be considered. Here are the major two that I see.

1. With voters only being allowed to select ten films, it’s
unlikely that many directors showed up twice on a lot of ballots. As Roger Ebert points out, this means that directors with more than one “masterpiece” likely split their own vote. For example, voters that wanted to select a Scorsese film
were probably forced to choose between Taxi Driver and Raging Bull unless they wanted to use up two spots on a ballot that already had
precious little space. This hurt the chances of either film showing up on the
finished list, unlike (for example) The Searchers, which is pretty unanimously believed to be John
Ford’s greatest work. Other directors (probably) hurt by this quirk: Truffaut (400
Blows or Jules et Jim?), Kurosawa (Seven Samurai or Rashomon?), Chaplin (City Lights,
The Gold Rush, or Modern
Times?), Coppola (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, or Apocalypse Now?), Keaton (The General or Sherlock Jr.?), Bergman (The Seventh Seal or Persona?), and Godard
(Breathless or Contempt?). If voters were permitted a top 50, or even a top
25, this vote-splitting effect would have been substantially diminished.

2. Voters were not required to rank their ten selections,
and all films voted for on any ballot were weighted equally. More than anything,
this might be the biggest reason Citizen Kane was unseated. In this latest poll, Kane received 157 votes compared to Vertigo’s 191. But how many of the 157 people that voted for Kane
think it is the single greatest film of all time? My guess is a
higher number than the amount of people that would say that about Vertigo. If voters were required to rank, and points were
awarded on a weighted basis according to those rankings, I think Citizen
Kane would have still finished #1 despite
appearing on fewer overall ballots.

But even with these flaws, this is still a great list,
and as Peter Matthews says in the latest issue of Sight & Sound, people upset by Citizen Kane’s placing
should still be able to rejoice in the “proof that film canons are not
completely fossilized.” It’s useful to be reminded in such a concrete way that
opinions and accepted truths do
change over time.

And consider this: in the 2002 poll, Citizen Kane appeared on 46 of the 145 critic's ballots, or about 32%. This year, Kane's157 votes means it only appeared on 19% of the critic's ballots.

The full top 100 list for both the critic’s and director’s
polls will be revealed later this month, as will the actual ballots of every
single voter. But until that happens, here are some thoughts and observations
on what we know so far.

·I’ve
always liked Vertigo better than Citizen
Kane. To me, Vertigo is the more psychologically complex film, richer in
its lingering effect on the viewer, and it probably uses color better than any
other film. However, I do think Citizen Kane remains the more important and influential film
overall. Does this mean voters are subconsciously saying that psychological
complexity is more important to them now than technological and stylistic
innovations? I suspect it’s no accident that Vertigo ascended to the top of the list at a time when
cinema’s two greatest contemporary filmmakers (David Fincher and Christopher
Nolan) are people that have been massively and obviously influenced by its
exploration of the darker corners of the human psyche.

·According
to Entertainment Weekly, Nick James, the editor of Sight & Sound, suggested
that this result “reflected changes in the culture of film criticism,” and
voters appear to be “more about works that have personal meaning to the
critic.” However, Richard Rushfield (of the Daily Beast) suggests that Citizen
Kane was dethroned merely because of the
Twitter era that we now live in, where everything experiences backlash at an
accelerated rate, and the very notion of something being seen as “the best”
ensures that people will go out of their way to prove otherwise. If this is true, Vertigo could experience a rather short reign at the top.

·Three
silent films made the top ten for the first time since 1972. With more voters
than ever, and over 2,000 films receiving at least one vote (!!!), the silent
era appears to be one of the few corners of film history where a consensus has
(almost) been reached. But, fascinatingly, that consensus has now excluded
Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925),
which made the top ten of every previous poll, but finished 11th
this year. While it’s true that the difference between 10th and 11th
place is pretty extremely arbitrary, it’s still a significant slip for a
film that appeared to have a permanent lock on the top ten. As with the Kane/Vertigo switch,
Potemkin is the more technically
innovative film, while the three silents that finished ahead of it appeal more
overtly to the viewer’s emotions.

·With
Potemkin slipping out, Jean Renoir’s The
Rules of The Game, a 1939 French comedy of
manners, is now the only film to appear in the top ten of every poll. It
finished 10th in 1952, moved up to 3rd in ’62, then finished
2nd behind Citizen Kane for
three straight polls before sliding back down to 3rd in 2002 and
slipping to 4th this year. For a film that reveals more nuances and
hidden plots with every viewing, I would expect this spot to be secure for a
long time.

·The
Godfather & The Godfather
Part II finished 4th in the 2002
poll while occupying one spot, because BFI allowed voters to count them
together as a single work. This year, however, the rules stipulated that the two
films be counted separately, and presumably voters ended up picking one or the
other. The two films plummeted out of the top ten as a result, finishing at 21
& 31 respectively. However, if the votes for both films were combined, they
would have finished 7th, just ahead of The Searchers. Though on the director’s list, The
Godfather and Vertigo tied at #7, with Tokyo Story finishing #1.

·Only
two films from the 2000’s appeared in the critic’s top 50, In the Mood for
Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000) at #24 and Mulholland
Dr. (David Lynch, 2001) at #28, and even
those are both over ten years old now. This isn’t a huge surprise, considering
the most recent film in the top ten (2001) is 44 years old. People like to know a film has stood the test of
time before anointing it. But from the last decade, I would expect films like The
Social Network, There Will Be
Blood, Pan’s Labyrinth, No Country For Old Men, and City of God to all make some noise on this list in the decades to
come.

It’s
always fascinating to see the differences between the two lists. Right away you
can tell the directors were less afraid to vote a bit more recent, with four
films in the top ten hailing from the 1970’s, and no silent films made the
director’s top ten. This is probably a sign that the directors were less
concerned about the results being “right” than the critics are (perhaps
indicating why the critic’s list is viewed as more definitive), and are
therefore more willing to vote without self-imposed rules (i.e. can’t be too
recent, have to pick a silent, etc.). It also appears that the directors are
more enamored with the purity of a filmmaker’s vision and degree of difficulty
than they are with emotional connectivity.

And the switch at the top is particularly interesting. As with the critic's poll, Citizen Kane fell to #2 after a long reign at the top. But unlike the critic's poll, where the top two films from the 2002 version just switched places, the director's selected Tokyo Story #1, after it finished 16th in the 2002 edition. A huge leap, to be sure, and I don't have any idea what accounted for it.

What would I have voted for? I won’t lie, one of my goals as
a critic in life is to one day be asked to vote in this poll, so of course
I’ve thought about it. Unfortunately, I’m still at a point where I’ve seen
a huge number of important films only once (or not at all), and I wouldn’t want
to vote for anything that I hadn’t seen enough times to fully appreciate. As
for my definition of greatness, I’ve always viewed it as a 50/50 combination of
importance and quality, but I also like the idea of populating my ballot with a
little bit of everything suggested by Sight & Sound in their email to
voters: some historical importance, some pinnacles of aesthetic achievement,
and some personal impact on my own relationship with cinema. So here’s my best
stab:

1. The Third Man (Carol
Reed, 1949)

2. Pulp Fiction (Quentin
Tarantino, 1994)

3. Vertigo (Alfred
Hitchock, 1958)

4. The Godfather (Francis
Ford Coppola, 1972)

5. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

6. The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)

7. Blade Runner (Ridley
Scott, 1982)

8. Rashomon (Akira
Kurosawa, 1950)

9. Being John Malkovich (Spike
Jonze, 1999)

10. Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop

Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

And just because, here are the five movies that I had the
most difficulty cutting off my list: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966), The Bridge on the
River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), Annie
Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Bonnie
& Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and Groundhog
Day (Harold Ramis, 1993).